[tavavex]

> It's a Constitutional Republic.

Which is a kind of democracy. Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people. This is a weird framing that I see brought up by Americans only, and I don't understand it, because direct democracies (what these Americans are actually referring to when they say 'democracy') are basically extinct in the modern world. They keep trying to distance themselves from the term. Most democratic nations today are presidential or parliamentary republics, just like you, or something that can be approximated to one of them. I'm doubtful that the US founders didn't recognize they were founding a democratic nation, just a specific subcategory - but ultimately still a state that should hopefully answer to the people.

Neither does federalism relate to the form of government - you could have a federal or distributed direct democracy if you wanted to. They're just different categories of things, the way you choose how to best represent the will of a group of people is a different question from how you subdivide these groups into self-governing blocks.

[andrewla]

But Adams was specifically arguing not against democracy in the broad term, but specifically, unconstrained direct democracy, so this is not relevant to this discussion.

[abernard1]

I don't know. Is it irrelevant?

Is it interesting that all these "democracies" around the world have persistent speech bans? When someone says something they don't like?

I seem to have a recollection of flipping through HN for a decade or so and people talking about all the meanie-pants who want people to be able to speak freely, even if it hurts people's feelings and might not be endorsed by the elected government.

[abernard1]

> Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people

No. It's not. I encourage you to read the quite enlightening treatment of democracies in the Federalist Papers. And Greece's government was nothing like Rome. If there is a conflation there, it is one largely created by America.

Which in its own right is interesting. What is interesting about the longest-running continuous constitutional government in history (America)?

[tavavex]

> And Greece's government was nothing like Rome.

I presume you're referring to the various systems of democracy introduced in different ancient Greek city-states, as opposed to the Roman Republic. Of course, they're different. But it doesn't run counter to what I said - being descendant from the ideas of democracy doesn't promise you that any aspect of the government will be in any way similar, only that the power will ultimately originate from the people in some way. You don't even have to go ancient for this - there are dozens of different takes on democracy in the modern world.

To emphasize - I'm not arguing against the distinctions or the new ideas that were made during the founding of the US, or that some of these ideas weren't novel. I'm arguing against the school of thought that seemingly arose long after that happened, which tried to categorize the US into a bespoke category of government that included it and excluded other nations, modern and historical - despite them all definitionally being ruled by the people and often even having similar ways of organizing their governments. Let's review the terms.

An autocracy is a state where power descends from a single person, the autocrat. An absolute monarchy is a subset of autocracy, where that person is a monarch, usually with religion tying into their perceived legitimacy. An aristocracy is a state where power descends from an upper elite class. In anarchy, the power descends from no one in particular. Democracy is the class that is opposed to these other forms, it's a system of rule by many where power descends from lots of people. It includes many flavors and forms that result in different types of government - direct, indirect/representative (you are here), as well as many sub-variants that define the exact way of how power moves from the ruled to the rulers or other characteristics.

Therefore, republics are a strict subset of the broad term of democracy. There are lots of republics in the modern world, all of which are democratic states, just as there are constitutional democracies. If you want to distance the US from these other states, you would need to prove why it was not envisioned as a power-from-the-people state and what exactly would place it in a different category that no one else occupies. The US may have been the first, but it's not that unique in the modern landscape of governments.